Sunday, September 22, 2013

History, one might
presume, is an assemblage of facts, and the longer and more complex a particular
history is the more facts there are. But facts are malleable, and it took
me many years of history reading to come to understand that they too
often are merely reflections of historians' perspectives --
the political axes they happen to grind. This may be no truer than in the
modern history of the Middle East because of the diet of chauvinistic
Eurocentric claptrap that we have been force fed beginning with school
texts and continuing through the tsunami of books extolling the
benevolent greatness of the once and future colonial powers.

That
Scott Anderson refuses to buy into this big lie is chief among the many
virtues of his magnificent new geopolitical history, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East.
While nominally a biography of the heroic if quixotic T.E. Lawrence,
played to such great effect by Peter O'Toole in David Lean's 1962
cinematic masterpiece, it more importantly is the tale of British
duplicity, with ample help from the French and the quasi-involvement of
feckless Americans, in double-crossing the Arabs in the wake of their successful revolt against their Turkish oppressors in the closing days of World War I.

Having
been promised self-determination in the form of their
own homeland as a reward for crushing the Ottoman Empire in its
inhospitably arid western expanses, the Arabs instead were left with
sloppy seconds as the imperial powers arbitrarily carved up the region,
ostensibly at the post-war Versailles Peace Conference but in reality as a result
of the Sykes-Picot Agreement hammered out in secret two and a half
years before the Armistice.

The upshot was the artificial boundaries
of colonial Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and eventually the state of Israel,
as well. The predictable result -- and it broke Lawrence's heart as
the Arabs' only true champion -- has been never ending ethnic strife,
poverty,
disenfranchisement, religious extremism
and, of course, terrorism. Long story short, the Iraq, Iran and
now Syrian crises were not accidents, but inevitabilities.

"Ever since [the end of World War I], Arab society has tended to
define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is
opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many
forms," Anderson writes. As a New York Times op-ed columnist recently noted, this culture of opposition has enabled
generations of dictators to distract attention from their own misrule.

And
in one of his most prescient comments, Lawrence discarded the fiction relentlessly peddled by the Great Powers that the
Arabs would accept a Jewish nation in their midst. Instead,
he predicted that "if a Jewish state is to be created in Palestine, it
will have to be done by force of arms and maintained by force of arms
amid an overwhelmingly hostile population."

Oh, and let us not forget that the emergence of the U.S.'s best regional buddy, Saudi Arabia, and its terrorist-breeding, ultra-conservative Wahhabist form of Islam, is a result of the stew concocted by Britain and France.

Things
might not have worked out a whole lot differently had those nations kept their promises. But we will never know because once planted,
the toxic seed of imperialist duplicity has not and never will be
completely eradicated. While the Arab Spring is a beautiful thing, the
tortured history that preceded it and its uncertain future are an
inevitable result of the folly alluded to in the subtitle of Lawrence in Arabia.

* * * * *

T.E.
Lawrence was a welter of contradictions. Beyond agreement that he had
the iciest of blue eyes and stood five-foot-five inches tall (10 inches
shorter than O'Toole), historians have squabbled endlessly over whether
this controversial and enigmatic figure, who "rode into battle at
the head of an Arab army and changed history," Anderson writes, was greatness personified
or merely lucky.

The
short answer, Anderson concludes, is anticlimactic: Although Lawrence's
exploits were larger than life, he was able to become Lawrence of
Arabia because no one was paying much attention.

"Amid
the vast slaughter occurring across the breadth of Europe in World War
I, the Middle Eastern theater of war was of markedly secondary
importance. Within that theater, the Arab Revolt to which Lawrence became affiliated was, to use his own words, 'a sideshow of a sideshow.' "

* * * * *

Lawrence is, of course, the primary focus of Lawrence in Arabia, but Anderson artfully weaves in the stories of four other key but comparatively little known characters: Curt
Prufer, a German scholar turned spy and Turkish adviser; Djemal
Pasha, a Turkish leader who showed equal parts compassion and ruthlessness; William Yale, a New England blue
blood and State
Department special agent while on Standard Oil of New York's
payroll, and Aaron Aaronsohn, an agronomist and master spy who
was at odds with most other advocates of a Jewish state and contemptuous
of the dirt poor Palestinians who would be displaced.

While Lawrence helped the Arabs win the war but could not help them win the peace,
his lasting legacy is his plea that Westerners discard their stilted thinking about Arabs and
immerse themselves in the local environment, wherever it might be, as to know "its families,
clans and tribes, friends and enemies, wells, hills and roads."

Lawrence is best known for Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a
sometimes overly fanciful yet fascinating account of his years as a
liaison officer with rebel forces during the Arab Revolt on which the
Lean movie is based. But it is his Twenty-Seven Articles, a treatise written for his superiors in 1917, that continues to have profound influence today. Nearly a century later, Twenty-Seven Articles
has the force of revelation, and amid the American military "surge" in
Iraq in 2006, General David Petraeus ordered his senior officers to read
it so that they might better learn how to win the hearts and minds of
the Iraqi people.

Today's State Department diplomats -- whether toiling in Benghazi or Beirut -- would be well advised to do the same.

MEANWHILE . . .

Two
other books that I've recently read brilliantly capture the
transcendental futility of World War I: Robert Graves' autobiographical Good-Bye to AllThat and Mark Helprin's fictional A Soldier of the Great War.

Good-Bye (1929), which is considered to be one of the greatest of non-fiction books,
traces Graves' monumental loss of innocence as a captain in the Royal Welsh
Fusiliers as he grapples with the horror of the war and later bitterly bids farewell
to England and its absurd class culture. A Soldier (2005) is the magnificently told story of a
prosperous Roman lawyer whose life is shattered by the war. He becomes
a hero, then a prisoner and deserter who wanders through a ravaged
Europe, in the process losing one family for another.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Many reasons have been
offered for the near-paralysis among the U.S. and its allies in
fashioning a response to the thuggery of the Assad regime in
Syria. Does anyone really believe that relieving the strongman of a few canisters of nerve gas will make a difference? But the perhaps least discussed reason is by far the biggest: The Bush
Legacy, a toxic gift that keeps on poisoning.

I
write of course, of the eight-year interregnum during which George W.
Bush, Dick Cheney and their henchmen, chief among them Donald Rumsfeld
and John Bolton, used the 9/11 attacks some 12 years ago today as a pretense for invading Iraq
at the cost of a trillion-plus dollars and 4,400 American and many tens
of thousands of Iraqi lives. Their actions obliterated a healthy
budget surplus, in tandem with tax cuts for the rich tanked the economy and, most importantly in the context of the Syria crisis, plunged
America's standing in the world to an historic low. The toxicity of the Bush Legacy cannot be underestimated, or as Dubya himself would say, misunderestimated.

It,
and not some new found cowardice, is the predominant reason Britain, the U.S.'s most dependable ally in the post-World War II
world, and Germany, among other European powers, have turned cold
shoulders to Obama's overtures, as if to say, "Fool us once,
shame on you; fool us twice, shame on us." "The real reason the vote [in the British Parliament to back Obama] was lost was not so much doubt about strategy
as the toxic nature of association with the United States, the idea of
being dragged along again like a poodle in a U.S.-led military
operation," Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute told The New York Times.
“For Britain’s self-defined status in the world the vote was
catastrophic. It has fatally hit the special relationship.”

Combine
that with a profound war weariness at home directly attributable to the
Iraq war and the mission in Afghanistan, which was repeatedly looted by the Bush administration
in service of the Iraq fiasco, as well as a maddening wishy-washiness on President Obama's part on foreign affairs generally, and you have the recipe for that near-paralysis.

If there is an upside to the Bush Legacy, it may be that the very neocons
who are sharpening their knives in anticipation of playing a major role
in which Republican will face off against Hillary Clinton in 2016, will find their standing in the party seriously diminished. But there is a downside to that, as well -- the neo-isolationists like Marco Rubio now emergent in the party who in their own way are as dangerous as the waterboard crowd.

After
all, Assad and other bad guys doing bad things around the world
aren't going to go away. And the United Nations isn't going to suddenly
grow a pair, which means that the next strongman accused of having weapons of mass destruction needs to be dealt with firmly. Like that Saddam Hussein.

Oh, wait a minute . . .

* * * * *

There is more or less a consensus among historians that the worst presidents in U.S. history were Warren G. Harding, Ulysses S. Grant, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Franklin Pierce.

While each of these ignobles left big messes for their successors to clean up (except in the case of Grant, who made an even bigger mess than had Johnson, his predecessor), and even allowing for how different the world stage is today than 60 or 160 years ago, the Bush Legacy is indeed in a league of its own.

If we can be thankful for anything, it is that unlike the unapologetic Cheney and Rumsfeld, whose loathing of Obama is visceral, Bush has kept his pie hole shut about Syria. Some commentators are saying that his refusal to take a stand is cowardly, while I happen to think it is wise.

I give Bush enough credit to believe that he knows he's a Nowhere Man. And to riff off another rock lyric, most Americans -- as well as the world community at large -- won't get fooled again.

About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.